In the history of college basketball, most of the unsung heroes are role players such A.J. Granger of the 2000 Michigan State Spartans or A.J. Bramlett of the 1997 Arizona Wildcats. Those players quietly helped their teams win championships. TBS rescued the future of the NCAA Tournament.

No, that’s not quite right. The folks at Turner Sports saved all of college basketball in the spring of 2010. They kept the entire sport from plunging toward a regular season of irrelevance leading to a dull, overexpanded championship tournament.

That’s where all this was headed, you know: to 96 teams in the NCAAs and to no one really giving a darn about a regular season that preceded such a sham. The NCAA felt it needed to make a certain amount of money from the tournament each year to keep its membership happy—that figure was somewhere north of $700 million annually—and it was suggested to the organization’s leadership that the only way to such a figure was more teams and more games.

Then Turner rode to the rescue, partnering with CBS on a deal that assured such a payment was feasible and with a field comprising only 68 teams. Turner’s reward for that was an option to present the Final Four on its airwaves, which it exercised Tuesday. The national semifinals will be broadcast on TBS in each of the next two years, and the entire Final Four will be on TBS in 2016 and every other year thereafter until 2024.

Not that it’s been overwhelming, but there has been a surprising amount of negative reaction to this development. “Disgusting.” “Brutal.” “Hate this.” "Terrible." “NOOOOOO.” All of these responses came directly from Twitter.

So that’s the thanks the folks at Turner get.

It’s the same every year when we get to the First Four, a series of opening NCAA Tournament games that reward a few extra teams each season and inconvenience exactly no one, and still the incessant complaints flow.

The truth is that 68 saved everyone from 96. The truth is that 96 would have been the worst thing ever to happen to college basketball, robbing teams of incentive to excel in the regular season and fans from investing any emotion or interest in how it developed. And the truth is Turner’s cable wealth—it receives income from both subscription fees and advertising, whereas network channels receive only the latter—is the reason the NCAA was able to hold the line at a 68-team field.

Moving the Final Four from broadcast television to cable would have made the event smaller only if we were talking about this happening in 1984. It’s a different world now. The Turner/CBS combination resulted this past March in the most-watched NCAA Tournament in 19 years. As of last October, TBS was available in nearly 100 million American homes, just under 90 percent. Many of those that have “cut the cord”, removing cable or satellite in favor of watching programs via the Internet, will have access to the Final Four via internet webcasts, which also have been growing in terms of audience response.

And if all else fails, there is the option of visiting a bar or restaurant showing the games.

Some of the Masters has been on cable, and the Stanley Cup playoffs, and the Olympics. The Rose Bowl hasn’t been on broadcast TV since the 2011 game. For most of us, the difference between watching a game on network and watching on cable is merely a different numerical sequence punched into the remote. That’s worth griping about?

For me, it's 1012 for CBS, 1202 for Turner. Anyone can live with those numbers, so long as it's not 96 teams in the NCAA Tournament. For that, TBS deserves a parade.